A DOOM OF HIS OWN: The brokenhearted London-ness is amplified by Albarn’s wandering, Parisian sense of melody.

Damon Albarn — Blur frontman, Gorillaz supremo, and now millennial minstrel to the drowning city of London — is that eerie modern specimen, the pop star who talks like a critic. I’m sure he doesn’t think like a critic; it’s quite impossible to move millions of units while thinking like a critic. But he certainly does talk like one. In 1995, when the BBC was making a program called Britpop Now, Albarn “suggested to the show’s producers,” as John Harris writes in his book The Last Party, “that he might take the role of presenter.” The producers were delighted with the idea, and Albarn duly wrote and performed an introduction that — apart from a single, intrusive “we” — could have been taken verbatim from a moderately insightful potboiler band biography: “Three years ago in the spring of 1992 Blur had embarked on their second tour of America. We’d been there the previous autumn and had been very well received, but this time it was very different. In short, Nirvana, Nirvana — everywhere Nirvana.”

Pop stars, unless they’re David Bowie, do not talk like that. The great Blur/Oasis showdown that was in full swing even as Albarn rehearsed his lines for Britpop Now was a battle, when you got right down to it, between a man happy to contemplate his band in the third person and another man — Liam Gallagher — who seemed incapable of escaping the first, who didn’t use phrases like “in short” but stood on tables in pubs and shouted about getting into a fight with the Beatles. As he famously boasted, “I had a dream where I drop-kicked him in the throat, George, and smashed McCartney from here to Jupiter and back. He didn’t have his seatbelt on. My name is disturbance!” It was Liam’s devouring, one-eyed ego, teetering over the huge rehashed chords and the rhythm section that sounded as if it would fall off the edge of the world if it stopped playing in 4/4, that drove Oasis into pop greatness. Albarn, condemned to be self-aware, would have to work a little harder.

And work he did, prodigiously. He swerved, dabbled, collaborated, brainstormed. He magpied and gadfly’d. He went to Africa and made Mali Music (Astralwerks) with Afel Bocoum, Toumani Diabate, and Ko Kan Ko Sata Doumbia. He wrote a film score (Ravenous) with Michael Nyman. In a mind meld with fellow conceptualizer Jamie Hewlett he dreamed up a virtual pop act — Gorillaz — and had some huge non-virtual hits. He is currently working on a “circus opera” that takes its theme from a Chinese legend. (Forty-five acrobats and a Shaolin choir are said to be involved in its performance.) And now he gives us The Good, the Bad & the Queen (Virgin), a project in which the various talents of Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Gnarls Barkley’s DJ Danger Mouse, and the Verve’s Simon Tong are unified under the sign of a falling-to-bits kingdom, England in her waning. Gasworks, dark canals. Songs about pub dread and whales dying in the Thames, all performed in the arch, resigned croon of an end-times Ray Davies.

Gorillaz in the midst Remember the great electronica gold rush of ’97, the year Madonna’s Maverick label won a massive bidding war over long-ignored rave mystic Liam Howlett, a/k/a Prodigy, and we all grooved to the electropunk clash of “Smack My Bitch Up”?

DARE Although Gorillaz musical mastermind Damon Albarn is busy recording with the Good, the Bad and the Queen, all’s not quiet on the Gorillaz front, at least not on the commercial front.

Gorillaz at the Apollo There were puppets, singing and dancing middle schoolers, a gospel choir, a 14-piece string section from Juilliard, a who’s who of guests, including Neneh Cherry, De La Soul, Ike Turner, and a lollipop-sucking Shaun Ryder. But no Jamie Hewlett animations?!

Gorillaz | Plastic Beach Although this is their first album without an indie-chic producer, the fake band with fake cartoon characters known as Gorillaz stay the course as a very real post-Blur conduit for Damon Albarn's quasi-apocalyptic, '80s-daydreaming, neon-pop habit.

Gnarls Barkley: Rebirth of soul I’m probably not the only one who went to the Gnarls Barkly show Friday night at Avalon wondering if the costumes would be the most interesting part. Slideshow: Gnarls Barkley at Avalon, August 11, 2006

Stealing culture The following review of Good Copy Bad Copy does not appear in the Phoenix ’s film section.

Parental advisory An exceedingly bizarre sequence of events transpired this past week — the parents of two different playoff-competing NBA players were arrested in separate incidents, one on each coast.

Rockers moonlighting with non-rock producers The Killers first worked with Stuart Price on a dance remix of their hit “Mr. Brightside” — and so far, this blend of rock-band brawn and electro-dance bliss has worked smashingly.

’Round the outside Although music isn’t necessarily getting more political in content these days, it does seem to be borrowing a trope from the political world.

GETTING TO KNOW PHILIP LARKIN WITH A NEW EDITION OF HIS POEMS | April 26, 2012 "A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.

BLACK SABBATH ARE BACK — IN PRINT AND ON FILM | November 14, 2011 The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.